President Bush imposed new unilateral US sanctions against the Government of Sudan yesterday for failing to halt what he has branded the genocide in Darfur. “The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world,” the President said in a brief statement at the White House.

The sanctions target 31 government-run companies mainly involved in the lucrative oil industry of Sudan, as well as three individuals. These include high-ranking government officials and a rebel leader suspected of being involved in four years of violence that has cost more than 200,000 lives and forced 2.5 million to flee their homes.

Mr Bush made plain yesterday that he had finally lost patience with the Government of Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum who, along with Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, had last month staved off an earlier announcement of sanctions by begging for more time.

“President Bashir’s actions over the past few weeks follow a long pattern of promising cooperation while finding new methods for obstruction,” Mr Bush said yesterday. “One day after I spoke, they bombed a meeting of rebel commanders designed to discuss a possible peace deal with the Government. In the following weeks he used his Army and government-sponsored militias to attack rebels and civilians in south Darfur.”

Mr Bush has been under intense pressure from human rights groups, including conservative Evangelical Christians in America, to take tougher action against Sudan.

The final straw came last weekend, when Mr al-Bashir announced his opposition to the deployment of a 22,000-strong joint UN and African Union peacekeeping force. The Sudanese President said that he would accept only technical and logistical support.

“For too long the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a Government that is complicit in the bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians,” Mr Bush said. “My Administration has called these actions by their rightful name: genocide. The world has a responsibility to put an end to it.”Mr Bush also directed Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, yesterday to work with allies such as Britain on drafting a new UN resolution for strengthening international pressure on the Sudanese Government. Any such measure faces an uphill battle to be approved by the UN Security Council, where China, which has strong ties with Sudan through oil, is likely to use its veto.

Liu Guijin, the new Chinese envoy on Africa, yesterday defended Chinese investment in Sudan as a better way to stop the bloodshed rather than the sanctions advocated by the US and other Western governments.

Fresh from his first trip to Sudan since his appointment this month, Mr Liu praised humanitarian efforts. “I didn’t see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger,” he said at a media briefing. Instead, he said, people in Darfur thanked him for the Chinese Government’s help in building dams and providing water supply equipment.

The conflict erupted in February 2003, when members of African tribes in Darfur rebelled against decades of discrimination by the Arab-domi-nated Khartoum Government. Sudanese leaders are accused of retaliating by unleashing the Janjawid militia to put down the insurrection using a campaign of murder, rape, mutilation and plunder.

Although both sides in the conflict are Muslims – in contrast to the earlier civil war with Christians in the south of the country – there are deep-seated ethnic divisions and disputes over land rights between the African farmers and the nomadic Arabs.

John Ukec Lueth, the Sudanese Ambassador to the US, said yesterday that he was very disappointed by the imposition of sanctions.

“We take one step forwards and the United States takes us three steps backwards,” Mr Lueth said, adding that Mr Bush should know from Iraq how difficult it was to stop sectarian strife. “Compare how many people die each day in Dafur and how many people die in Iraq?” he asked. “They are not comparable.”

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